The Quiet
by RiverCookie
Summary: The Optimus knockoff Nemesis Prime inexplicably reactivates, walks around for a while in the wasteland, and dies again. ...There's a little bit more to it than that, honest.


_In which TFP Nemesis Prime turns out to be slightly more autonomous than previously given credit for. Key word is "slightly"._

_(also, assume that everyone who could have spotted/tracked down Nemesis Prime is busy/dead.)_

* * *

A dim yellow light lit the darkness of the night.

In the limited memory of the robot now trudging through the emptiness of the outdoors, there remained the image of a dark room with various other mechanisms held inside, the sounds of panicked screaming, and the strain of running, running...

There was only silence now. Silence in the rocky darkness, silence in his head.

The movements he most clearly remembered making were walking, running, shooting, and slashing. He did a bit of those to try and make sense of things, retracing the steps that he had taken to get here. Before he woke up the second time, there was a bit of knocking around by someone who looked quite like himself, and before that he'd been slashing away at that mech, and before that he'd been shooting, and there were other faces that he hadn't the space in his memory to accomodate, and a bit of being a truck, and masked men...and then nothing.

Several rocks and flora had been demolished while he was thinking. When the echoes of their destruction faded away, the silence returned.

A voice had occupied that silence once. Not the kind of voice that had actual sound, the kind that tore from the throats of the humans he had charged past a while ago, the kind that he could still stutter out himself if he tried. It was more like...a presence. A commander. A continuous stream of will that gave him direction, gave him an objective. That had shorted out in the moments before the darkness.

So now what?

Keep walking.

After traversing unknown distances, a line of pavement cut through the expanse of dust and rock before him, and he remembered something about driving on them. ...As a truck, of course. There wasn't much driving to be done as a bipedal humanoid robot. There was a step in between being a truck and a robot, and he stumbled over that step as well as he could. After a bit of awkward bending and splitting and rearrangement, six wheels hit the road and started rolling.

He remembered that the voice directed him to places in this form. Drive, keep driving, drive past those buildings, those aren't important, but those buildings are, go turn into a robot and blow them up and go back to being a truck and drive past more buildings and come back to more buildings and he really, really hoped that he wouldn't find any buildings as he drove now, because the voice wasn't there anymore to tell him which ones to mess up or not. All that he wanted to do, all that was left to do was to move forward, and he did. The feeling of movement, of direction, helped ease the emptiness a little bit.

Light broke the horizon, and he stopped for a moment in the middle of the road just to watch. Gentle glow, warm, red, a much brighter red than the dark purply red he was made of. It seemed to mean something, but he couldn't quite grasp it with his limited mental capability. The scene was good to look at, though. There was no particular reason for it, it just...felt good. Eventually, something prompted him to get rolling again (maybe the one or two lonely drivers who swerved around him and yelled words he couldn't understand?), and he kept driving and driving, the light of the sun moving back overhead.

The scenery continued to change. The road was an asphalt ribbon he pulled in with his wheels, and the surrounding stone was tugged along with it. The occasional tree started to appear, and the trees started to break the monotony of the barren landscape more and more often until he suddenly found himself driving through a forest. He slowed to a halt, and pulled himself back up to two feet, feeling a strange sort of beckoning from the woody flora. He stood and stared for ages, and slowly stepped into the trees.

He walked, kept walking, until the road was far behind him and the trees were all around him, walked until he couldn't walk anymore. Really, he couldn't move his legs anymore, there just wasn't enough energy left in his body. So he stopped, and he listened.

It was silent here too, except it was a different sort of silence. Not the silence that came when nothing was there to answer, but the sort of silence where everything was there, and it was just waiting. He sat down and waited too.

And slowly, the silence in his head was overtaken by the wind rushing through the leaves, the lighthearted twittering of birds, the quiet rustling of fauna just beyond the green. Some creatures came up to him in curiosity, and he watched them in silence, unable to do anything more and content with that immobility.

The days passed, and then the weeks, and then months. Sunset, sunrise, changing seasons, changing times. Dust gathering in his joints and cavities, plants taking root and worming their way through his inner workings. The light in his optics grew dimmer with every passing moment, but he didn't mind. This was okay. This was good.

And the day came where he softly apologized to the plants that had taken up residence in and around his body for the mess he was going to make, and laid down in the grass. The sky was clear today, so his vision was taken up by an expanse of brilliant blue, fringed with the leaves of neighboring trees.

There was another robot like him with eyes of that color. That mech was still alive, it was still daytime for him. He waited for his own time of day.

Seconds. Minutes. Hours. The sky changed. The blinding light of the sun shifted across the sky, making its way to the horizon, spreading a warm-colored light across the blue sea. Yellow, orange, pink, blue...they never bothered to give you a face underneath your mask, so you couldn't really smile, but you could think about it, and try.

Silence fell again, not the kind that was an empty space, not the kind that was a waiting game, but the kind that was a sort of satisfaction, a reassurance that nothing more was needed anymore.

He closed his eyes.


End file.
